Cross Bus Explorer

Cross Bus Explorer is a lightweight, open-source Azure Service Bus explorer for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The current desktop application uses React and Tauri for the native UI while the stable Service Bus implementation remains in C#. Tauri starts the C# host as a private loopback sidecar and proxies only the application's /api/v1 routes.

Features

• Connection profiles using Azure CLI (az login), Default Azure Credential, workload identity, interactive browser login, or a SAS connection string
• Lazy queue, topic, and subscription explorer with message counts
• Create, clone, edit, enable/disable, and delete queues, topics, and subscriptions
• Create, edit, and delete subscription SQL, correlation, true, and false rules
• Peek or receive messages by count, sequence number, or until the source is empty
• Inspect, edit/copy, send, requeue, import, and delete messages
• Purge and dead-letter resend operations with cancellable background progress
• Live tracker per connection that shows which queues, topics, and subscriptions receive messages, peeks new messages, and can add temporary topic tap subscriptions (cbe-tap-*, auto-deleted when idle) to capture message content even after consumers processed it
• Dark and light themes with responsive native-window layouts

Connection metadata and connection-string secrets are stored separately in the platform application-data directory. Desktop files are owner-only on macOS and Linux, and connection strings are never returned to the React client.

Authentication

For the recommended Azure CLI flow:

az login

Then add a connection using the namespace host, for example orders.servicebus.windows.net. The signed-in identity needs the Azure Service Bus data roles required by the operation. Managing entities requires an owner role; message-only roles are sufficient only for the corresponding send/receive calls.

Workload identity profiles require a tenant ID, client ID, and federated token file. Default Azure Credential is useful in configured development, managed identity, and CI environments.

Development

Prerequisites:

• .NET 10 SDK
• Node.js 22.12 or newer
• Rust stable and the platform-specific Tauri prerequisites

Run the React UI against Vite:

cd src/Ui/Desktop
npm ci
npm run build

Run the native application (publishes the C# sidecar first):

cd src/Ui/Desktop
npm run tauri:dev

Create an optimized native package:

cd src/Ui/Desktop
npm run tauri:build

Run backend regression tests:

dotnet test tests/CrossBusExplorer.Tests/CrossBusExplorer.Tests.csproj

Unsigned local builds

Local packages are not code-signed. macOS may require Open Anyway under Privacy & Security, and Windows may show a SmartScreen warning. Official releases should add platform signing and notarization credentials in CI.